The Metaphysical Riddles of Abbas Kiarostami

By

Kristin M. Jones

Feb. 4, 2013 5:02 p.m. ET

A Close-Up Of Abbas Kiarostami

Film Society of Lincoln Center

Feb. 8-17

New York

'You leave feeling exhausted," the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has said of Hollywood movies. He prefers that viewers of his own films will complete them in their imaginations. A photographer and poet as well as a director, the 72-year-old directs sublime metaphysical riddles that can seem strikingly modernist, although his aesthetic is also rooted in tradition, including classical Persian poetry. He has been acclaimed for his skillful work with children and nonactors, his pitch-perfect dialogue and his iconoclastic approach to narrative. Perhaps most important, no director has more compellingly interwoven fiction and reality.

ENLARGE

No director has more compellingly interwoven fiction and reality than Abbas Kiarostami.
Laurent Thurin Nalset/Sundance Selects

One of the pleasures of exploring Mr. Kiarostami's career is noting the resonances between his films and the director's reshuffling of themes and motifs to new creative ends. "A Close-Up of Abbas Kiarostami," opening on Friday at New York's Film Society of Lincoln Center, will offer an in-depth retrospective, from rare early shorts and features to more recent experimental films and elegant narratives.

As a young man, Mr. Kiarostami studied painting and was an accomplished graphic designer. In 1969 he began working at the Institute for the Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults in Tehran, where he developed an affinity for stories about children and using documentary techniques. His first film, the lyrical short "Bread and Alley" ("Nan va koocheh," 1970), launched the institute's cinema division. Its theme—a solitary, fraught journey—has since frequently resurfaced in his work.

He created one of his most fascinating works, "Close-Up" ("Nema-ye nazdik," 1990), after a cash-strapped film enthusiast presented himself to a family as the director Mohsen Makhmalbaf. Creating an artful, oddly affecting hall of mirrors, Mr. Kiarostami filmed the actual trial of the imposter but also restaged events, casting some of the real-life participants. The defendant even compares himself to the protagonist of Mr. Kiarostami's "The Traveler" ("Mossafer," 1974), about a boy so desperate to attend a soccer match that he steals and cheats.

In "Where Is the Friend's Home?" ("Khane-ye doust kodjast?" 1987), set in the Iranian village of Koker, a boy searches for a friend whose exercise book he has taken home from school. After an earthquake ravaged that region in 1990, Mr. Kiarostami returned to make "Life and Nothing More . . ." ("Zendegi va digar hich," 1992), in which a director looks for the two boys cast in "Where Is the Friend's Home?" Mr. Kiarostami then made "Through the Olive Trees" ("Zir-e darakhatan zeyton," 1994), a love story based on a scene in "Life and Nothing More . . ."

The allure of nothingness, on the other hand, fuels the narrative in "Taste of Cherry" ("Ta'm-e guilass," 1997), which won the Palme d'Or at the 1997 Cannes Film Festival. Bent on suicide, a man repeatedly drives along a winding road on the outskirts of Tehran, searching for an accomplice among laborers at arid construction sites, finally making a pact with a man who insists on speaking stirringly of the world's beauty. "Taste of Cherry" closes with an astonishing, ambiguous nighttime scene in which lightning seems to battle literal and metaphorical darkness, followed by a coda in which we see Mr. Kiarostami and his crew at work on the film, signaling that although the story may have ended, the storyteller remains.

Nature has a more restorative presence in "The Wind Will Carry Us" ("Bad ma ra khahad bord," 1999), also about the beauty of life in the shadow of death. A filmmaker pretending to be an engineer arrives at a Kurdish village; as he waits for an unnamed event, he succumbs to pettiness and boredom. The title comes from a poem by the feminist poet Forough Farrokhzad, recited during a mysterious scene in which a girl milks a cow in a dark cellar, her face hidden. Mr. Kiarostami neither sentimentalizes tradition nor glorifies modernity, but by the conclusion, when a bone floats down a river while goats graze amid flowers, wisdom accompanies the shock of poetry.

More recently, Mr. Kiarostami has explored digital filmmaking, even comparing the use of a small digital camera to writing with a pen. Films from his "experimental period" include "ABC Africa" (2001), an impressionistic documentary about Ugandan orphans, and "Roads of Kiarostami" (2006), a meditation on the image of the road, a recurring motif in his films and landscape photography. The stories in "Ten" (2002) take place entirely within a woman's car. In "Shirin" (2009), another daring gambit that reflected his growing interest in female characters, about 100 actresses play audience members watching an unseen production of a tragic 12th-century epic, their expressions changing as the tale unfolds on the soundtrack.

Mr. Kiarostami's most recent film, "Like Someone in Love" (2012), shot in Tokyo, will open in New York and Los Angeles on Feb. 15, to be followed by a national release. A puzzle of mistaken identity and shifting notions of love, it revisits some of the themes in Mr. Kiarostami's previous work, the piercing, delicately uncanny "Certified Copy" ("Copie conforme"), one of his most assured and exquisite films. In that 2010 drama, which marked his return to narrative filmmaking, a French gallery owner living in Tuscany (Juliette Binoche) meets a British philosopher ( William Shimell), and they pretend to be husband and wife. Or are they really a married couple playing a desperate game? And what does their relationship tell us about how we should value art and each other? As the man says, quoting a Persian poem, "The garden of leaflessness, who dares say that it is not beautiful?"

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